New Plays

Dancing Mothers--The first play of the season will irritate a lot of people considerably owing to its insistent cheapness and will impress them none the less by its aggressive drama and abnormal ending.

For two acts, the people act just about as all people act in the first two acts of a flapper comedy. The daughter of the house enters carrying a high alcoholic content acquired at a Manhattan bachelor's apartment. The father of the house philanders with females of whom his wife, up to the time her good friend Mrs. Mazareen tells her about it for her own good, knows little. Thereupon the wife lights a cigarette and starts out to plug the domestic puncture by proving that she can be the gayest of the household.

In the process, she unfortunately falls in love with the svelt bachelor who has been clogging her daughter's moral passages with cocktails. The bachelor is further complicated by a somewhat inexpensive lady, who is also tangled into the husband's past. The whole combination assembles and there follow two acts.

Helen Hayes is, curiously enough, the featured player, although the play obviously belongs to the mother part. Mary Young accounted for the latter with flashes of distinction. To the cast and the twisted ending (the dancing mother marries the bachelor), the play owes its claims to serious attention.

The New York Telegram and Evening Mail--"It trips the light satiric--and slows down to a grand march away from Home, Sweet Home."

The Sun--"One of those recurrent comedies written in a state of considerable agitation over the way folks are carrying on these days."

Easy Street.--This particular wife started dying at an early age because, after she told her grandfather that she had sat on his silk hat, he spanked her. One thing led to another and by the second year of her married life she was telling her husband she had been home all day when she really had been to Manhattan and that hats cost eight dollars when they really cost twenty. The husband was stupid but he finally caught up with the parade of prevarications. Thereupon he produced a pistol and waved it around for the better part of an act until he had separately threatened everyone in the cast and all but the upper boxes in the audience. Ralph Kellard, as the husband, brought to this part as full an assortment of plain and fancy sound and fury as it is the misfortune of most witnesses to recall. Finally he did not shoot any one at all and took the wife back to their little paradise-on-the-installment-plan, because he could not order ice and milk. She was a good woman. And had she been as sensible as she was good she would have fanned him with a short, blunt instrument and gone off to live with the other man.

The New York Herald-Tribune--"Abounding in banalities and bromides."

The Sun--"One of those forlorn, home-made pieces which the powers behind the American theatre feel it best we should see and dispose of early in every season."

Marjorie.--When Andrew Tombes comes to town in a new musical show, it is an occasion for bonfires and public dancing in the streets. Suspicion has been growing of late that he is one of the Big Ten comedians. In Marjorie, Mr. Tombes is not endowed with any such happy material as his famous cinema burlesque in the "Follies," but there is much, none the less, to be thankful for. He plays the press agent of a famed actor and rewrites a "sap's" play because he loves the sister. The sap and the sister were played by Skeet Gallagher and Elizabeth Hines, respectively. Mr. Gallagher (no, it's a different one) plays a smooth blond part with a certain amount of contributory laughter. Miss Hines is as gracefully attractive as ever, though it was remarked in the audience that she had lost control entirely of her left shoulder. Then there was Roy Royston playing the famed actor with a distinct Cockney accent. And an amusing little tough child by Ethel Shutta. Probably not very much will be written about the music a hundred years from now, yet it sufficed for all those lacking too precise a memory. Laughs were distributed in favorable quantities and the dancers agitated happily. Casting up accounts, the visitor will find that he has received well above normal value for his admission ticket.

The New York American--"It has little originality or novelty, but it does all the old things well."

No Other Girl is a perfectly harmless injection of the usual musical comedy ingredients made interesting by the presence of Helen Ford and Eddie Buzzell. Playing the "weakest feature of the weaker sex in Quakertown," the latter hits upon a great advertising scheme, takes it to New York, finally acquires dollars to the general extent of a million. Meanwhile, she has been waiting for him. This seemed a serious error in construction on the part of the authors, since any libretto which eliminates Helen Ford from an entire second act can hardly be called flawless. There were one or two able melodies in the proceedings and many players of moderate reputation and ability. John Meehan, who long stood at the right hand of George M. Cohan, staged the piece and inserted welcome wedges of Cohan dancing. By and large, the entertainment is only mildly invigorating.

The New York Herald-Tribune--"All the ingredients which one has come to expect in polite musical comedy."

The New York Times--"Plenteously comic."

Dr. David's Dad.--Somehow the report got around that this play was the Abie's Irish Rose of Germany and people assembled to malign the effort mentally and laugh themselves sick on the side. Unhappily, the things that aroused hilarity in Germany did not sound so funny in the U. S. The translation sounded like a literal rendering of German grammar exercises by one of the least intelligent members of the class. The plot bestirs itself about a haughty family who think their daughter could have done a lot better than marry that young doctor. The young doctor's old father takes the second act pretty much into his own hands and creates a lot of disturbance by meretricious advertising in the papers, fake patients, and what not. Egon Brecher, the German who did the title role, was rumored to be considerable of a comedian. After the performance critics stated that the rumor was unfounded. The play survived four nights.